Introducing the new WooThemes support system

Written by Bryce Adams on June 2, 2015 Blog, News, Product News.

Over the years, we have improved our support system countless times. There have been many, many, many, many revisions to how we package and provide support to you, our dear customers.

But it’s not because we’re crazy or want to drive you crazy. It’s because here at WooThemes, our ultimate, defining purpose is to provide you with the best experience possible.

We don’t want you to have a great experience only when you purchase your first product or enter your billing details. We don’t want you to have a great experience only when you’re browsing our extensive catalog or activating your subscription. We want every single interaction you have with us and our products to be positive. In a few words — we want you to be happy.

With that in mind, we’re excited to bring you our new, easier-to-use support system. You can watch a quick video walkthrough below, or read on to learn more about the motivation behind it and some of the new features we’ve included.


The challenge: make support easier

A couple months ago, I was tasked with a simple but exciting challenge: make support easier. When I first joined Woo almost a year ago, that was actually my job description!

Back then, I was a WooCommerce Ninja, in the front line, supporting customers with all their WooCommerce questions. I saw a lot of happy customers in that time — but that was normally by the time I was done supporting them. Up until their problem was solved, they were frustrated and tired, and had every right to be. 

We were not doing a good enough job.

So I was excited, to say the least, to be tasked with making people happier. I had a chance to change things and possibly improve the experience of hundreds of thousands of customers. To me, that’s a pretty amazing reward.

Introducing our new support system

Two weeks ago, we rolled out our new support system to a select few customers. After collecting their feedback and making final adjustments, we have now rolled it out to everyone.

When you log into your WooThemes account, you’ll now find a Tickets tab. Under there, you can find all of your previous and current tickets. Everything has been revamped to bring you a more streamlined, simplified experience.

new-ticket-1

Need some assistance from our Ninjas? Try the new ticket forms for yourself. Click the big “open a new ticket” button to start a ticket with us. You’ll find the same familiar options and ticket categories from our previous forms, but with some pretty cool improvements.

How about we open a ticket together and see?

A quick walkthrough

Here’s what the new ticket screen looks like:

new-ticket-3

When you select your ticket category, you’ll notice some smart improvements to the system. For example, if you select “My Account,” you’ll be able to pick the specific order number you’re inquiring about, which will automatically pre-fill based on your account information:

new-ticket-5

Or if you choose “Themes,” you can pick the specific theme you’ve purchased or downloaded in the first drop-down menu:

new-ticket-4

So let’s say I’m having issues with Product Add-ons. I’ve been trying to add a checkbox, but it’s not working for me. Better open a ticket.

Our new support system is pretty smart. Along with these improvements, it also analyses and tries to solves your problems, according to your System Status Report, in real-time.

systemstatus

When I filled in my System Status Report, I got back some warnings!

before-ticket-errors

These messages prompt me to update WooCommerce & Product Add-ons. If that solves my problem, I don’t even have to open a ticket! If not, I can proceed with the process I’ve started.

When a new ticket is submitted, you’ll be given a confirmation screen and your ticket number:

new-ticket-confirm

On this screen you can also tells us what you think of the new ticket experience. Whether you like it or dislike it, you’ll be given a text box where you can tell us what you do or don’t like, and how else we can improve. Our goal is to make you happy, so don’t be afraid to give your feedback here!

Finally, when a Ninja responds — or if you simply want to check on the status — you’ll be able to view, reply to, or close your tickets either via email or this new dashboard. You’ll never have to leave your account page to have a conversation with us.

There are a bunch of new features that you’ll discover as you use our new system. Of course, as with everything new, problems can come up, so do let us know if anything goes wrong! We would love to hear your feedback and suggestions.

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22 Responses

  1. reskator
    June 2, 2015 at 7:23 pm #

    I do not understand: I bought Table Rate Shipping $99 and now the renewal, wihth 50 % discount, cost $99.50 !
    What proves that the price of this extension doubled?

    • Ryan
      June 3, 2015 at 4:35 pm #

      Hey there,

      This is the perfect time to use our new ticket form and use the My Account option to get in touch with our accounts team. They can look into your order and provide an explanation for you. 🙂

  2. reberholt
    June 3, 2015 at 8:25 pm #

    Is this a plugin that we can have too ?

    • Ryan
      June 3, 2015 at 11:24 pm #

      Unfortunately we don’t have plans to turn this into a plugin. It’d be incredibly hard to do so too, as it works with a lot of the custom work we’ve done to our site and WooCommerce and then within ZenDesk as well.

      Still though, take a form plugin like Ninja Forms or Gravity Forms and you could accomplish quite a bit in replicating our ticket forms. That could integrate with anything of your choosing as well. They have APIs to use to hook into your support system of choice. 🙂

      • NetPagz
        June 5, 2015 at 9:21 am #

        Please make this a plugin!! I would love to have this functionality on my site!!

  3. groovywoo
    June 4, 2015 at 7:55 pm #

    Just checking — but you are still using Zendesk right?

    • Ryan
      June 5, 2015 at 2:47 pm #

      Correct, ZenDesk runs our ticket system and these new forms just interface with it. Hopefully it is making it easier to submit tickets and let us help you efficiently!

  4. Michael Phillips
    June 4, 2015 at 7:59 pm #

    Will there be an opportunity to provide screen shots that better illustrate our issue(s)?

    • Ryan
      June 5, 2015 at 2:57 pm #

      There definitely is the opportunity. While there isn’t a place to upload screenshots directly on the ticket form, maybe that will be added down the road.

      Right now we’d recommend using tools like CloudUp or Droplr, and maybe even easier for some is to use other free services like Imgur or TinyPic

  5. Yael Reinhardt- Matsliah
    June 4, 2015 at 8:57 pm #

    Hope the new ticket system also includes more reliable and speedy responses to support tickets. I’ve not ever received support from Woo in less than a week. Has always taken several days sometimes just to have support ticket assigned to a support agent. In comparison, I’ve never waited more than 24 hours to receive support from iThemes Exchange.

    Just saying, a better support system can only really be better if the actual support improves as well.

    I hope that is under consideration as well.

    • Ole-Petter
      June 5, 2015 at 9:11 am #

      I have to say I totally agree with you on this one. The support on Woo is almost none existent, and not even close to what you expect from a premium theme and plugin company. Not to mention the pricing on plugins and extensions, who are mostly way overpriced. At the least you expect decent support when you pay for things..

      They need to learn from others with good and FAST support like SiteGround. I think Ive never waited more than five minutes on a support ticket at SG.

      • Noam
        June 5, 2015 at 12:14 pm #

        Hi Ole-Peter,

        In your opinion, are SiteGround better than WP Engine for WordPress hosting?

        • Ole-Petter
          June 9, 2015 at 1:48 pm #

          Sorry for the late reply, but I haven’t tested WP Engine. Ive been using SG for years and I will continue to do so. And I cant really compare them since I have VPS hosting and not managed WordPress hosting.

      • Nicole Kohler
        June 7, 2015 at 3:53 am #

        We hear you loud and clear and have been making many improvements to address tickets more quickly. Within 48 hours is our goal. Many thanks for your input Ole-Petter.

    • Nicole Kohler
      June 7, 2015 at 3:51 am #

      Hey Yael, many thanks for stopping by with your input here. We definitely agree, the new system is really not going to mean much if we’re not offering great support behind it! A week for first response sounds really unusual (48 hours is our goal and the norm as of late) and we’d encourage you to reach out if that happens again. We have certainly made improvements in beefing up our staffing and will continue to do as time goes on.

      Please do let us know if you have any suggestions or other thoughts you’d like to share, and of course we’d also like any feedback you have if you get a chance to use the new forms … though we’d rather not have you run into a problem, of course 🙂

  6. Kevin C
    June 6, 2015 at 3:45 pm #

    I find it interesting that there are no responses to the users who have experienced delayed responses to the entry of support tickets.

    • Nicole Kohler
      June 7, 2015 at 3:49 am #

      Hey Kevin! Much of our editorial team was traveling back from IRCE yesterday, thus the short delay in response. 🙂

  7. C. K.
    June 15, 2015 at 11:45 pm #

    This whole article just makes me wanna ask: which support?!

    Instead of investing in the way one can submit a ticket, you might want to invest in how you guys handle (solving is not the right word here) the ticket. There’s not even one little bit of pro-activeness to be found in all the tickets I had to open for multiple clients, although they spend lots.

    For now we don’t even bother opening tickets again (we might as well just write to ourselves: “hey, I’m not really in the mood so maybe you could disable all plugins and switch to the default theme on your high traffic website”). Smart move of you guys to nowhere allow ratings…

  8. Laura
    June 16, 2015 at 8:47 am #

    Right now I’m waiting for more than 69 hours and my tickets is still “Waiting for a ninja”. Well… screw you Ninja’s I would like say, I just would like to have a *quick support team*. The 48h goal mentioned above it totally not being met here. Worst thing is that my ticket is actually screaming URGENT, but apparently without success.

    I truly pay hundreds of dollars a year for the licenses I have at Woo. I switched to using only Woo Plugins and the Woo Canvas theme, because I thought that coming from the same ‘maker’, they would all smoothly work together. This is true for most of the time, but sometimes they don’t. That’s where I need support.

    The first response is always: “Did you disable all plugins and switch to the default theme”. Well, that’s kinda hard to do if you have hundreds of students with Sensei and a highly visited website, don’t you think? Thing is that if the support (eh “ninja”) had actually read my ticket, they would know to look further. Right now I’ve actually have a complete copy of my website to test all updates I do, because I just *don’t trust* the Woo plugin updates anymore. More than once they’ve made parts of the website fail (like: no more orders could come in, login on cart would redirect them to wrong pages, etc). I actually had to hire a WordPress expert to help me solve it all, but ofcourse this bring a lot more costs.

    For the prices I pay and the renewed licenses (not only for the latest updates, but also for the “support”) you would expect a decent response and a good and quick support. Right now, none of that happens.

    • Nicole Kohler
      June 16, 2015 at 4:49 pm #

      Hey Laura, while it’s tough for us to read this is good feedback. We thank you for giving it as it gives us a chance to reflect and improve.

      As noted in your ticket, we offer support on weekdays currently, so that 69 hours you mentioned does include a weekend, if I’m not mistaken. With any luck we’ll be able to grow our support team and shave some time off of that in the future.

  9. Gino
    June 22, 2015 at 11:12 pm #

    Hey Danke fuer die schoene Zeit auf dieser Webseite. Macht weiter bitte so.
    Da kommt man gerne wieder.

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